


Gone

by swamp_mouse



Category: Drake & Josh
Genre: Angst, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-12
Updated: 2010-03-12
Packaged: 2017-10-07 22:12:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 17
Words: 19,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/69777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swamp_mouse/pseuds/swamp_mouse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A drunken night changes Drake and Josh's relationship.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Josh

Josh steps into the shower to try to revive the working parts of his head. Under a rain of water he is able to breathe deeply without wanting to throw up again, but he is unable stop his knees from swaying so he carefully lowers himself down into the tub. The porcelain is cool and soothing against his skin and the sprinkles on his back feel like little pats _"it'll be OK, it'll be OK"._ Only now that he feels partly human again the events that led to him this unfortunate situation--head aching, mouth dry, stomach raw and heaving--starts to come back to him like the beginning of a ratcheting silent film.

He remembers Drake dragging him to a college party after afternoon swim practice. Why did he want him to go with him to this event so desperately? Oh yes, a girl he was meeting there needed a "safe" companion for her friend. Something like that, his painful head tells him, the same old story only this time the other girl doesn't show up and Drake abandoned him to take off with someone else, again. Josh was so tired from swimming a mile and a half in laps, and so thirsty that he decided to rest a little while in the corner and drink a few cupfuls of the cranberry punch before walking home. At some point he noticed the dance music began to slow and the room started to become unfocused. After a few more cups voices melded together and it didn't matter that Drake had left him alone and car-less, he felt excellent. And then he wasn't alone, so many faces and hands around him, wanting to talk, wanting to dance, he thinks someone actually tried to kiss him. He recalls how good it felt not to care about Drake and be sought after by the older college kids. And even more remarkable, that people, smart non-geek ones, actually want to listen to him talk and were laughing along with him.

Then Drake's handsome face blurred in and out in front of him like he was seeing him through a rotating camera lens unable to focus. Drake was yelling at him about vodka and he looked so mad. Josh couldn't understand what was the cause of this anger yet allowed himself to be led reluctantly away from his new friends. The sounds of the party he loved so much, the ice clinking into glasses, the spurts of laughter, the faint pitch of music faded until he could only hear himself say over and over _"I'm sorry Drake, I'm sorry"._ He can not remember the car ride home, just Drake's rough hand over his mouth to stop his laughing as they sneaked inside their house. And then there was something else ...

_Oh my god,_ he suddenly remembers in vivid technicolor. The memory causes him to clench his eyes shut and lean his head against the wall tiles. The tub is blessedly steady and not spinning under him.

It was Josh's idea. It was his doing. Once Drake dragged him into their room he must of stumbled, or swayed, allowing him push Drake against the wall so hard that he felt his stepbrother's hip bones dig into his. Or did he slam him against the wall? God, he hopes not. He remembers Drake's face was shadowed in the darkness, it was not possible to see his expression or the freckles he knew were there, so he continued to push against him because he was drunk and didn't care about consequences. He ran his hand down a bare arm, the hard line of it, feathered with soft hair and he breathed heavily into his neck. And before he could do anything else, Drake bent his head towards him, chest heaving, hands fisted on his collar, and kissed him, straight across the mouth. He had never known a mouth could taste that good, so good and tight around his, making his head swim -- or was that the alcohol, he no longer could differentiate. He grasped at Drake's face with clumsy hands while other fingers roamed down his sides and tugged on his belt loops to lead him to the bed. Josh then felt himself spiraling on top of Drake as legs straddled firmly around his hips.

_"Oh ... my... god," _he says out loud to no one. Now he remembers it all: the yanking of T-shirts over heads, the burrowing of fingers into his ass, the sudden pain of greedy mouth on the side of his neck -- all done with an urgency, a haste, a feeling that, perhaps, if this isn't done quickly it would not happen. They became simply lovers --no names, no stepbrothers, no genders, just them and they had wanted each other so bad, so bad.

Josh opens his eyes and the bathroom is suddenly too sunny, the present tense too bright. The water falling against the porcelain is too loud. He carefully touches the side of his neck and feels the bruise of a hickey. It wasn't a dream, it really happened. He uses a wobbly arm to push himself up. He stumbles out of the shower and wraps a towel loosely around his torso. He needs to find Drake but only manages to shuffle through the hall and crawl back into his bed. And despite feeling like he just threw up his stomach, lungs, and liver, and despite his head squeezing in pain with each heartbeat, he falls back asleep with a smile.


	2. Drake Waffles

Josh is so hungover he doesn't see me lying on the couch waiting for him. I knew he would want to "talk" and I am ready, but instead he just gropes his way to the bed and collapses. I walk up to his form and say a tentative "_Josh_?" but he is dead asleep. His eyelids twitch and there as a tiny, knowing smile on his face. I tell myself it is only the same ole Josh lying two feet away from me--yet something about the scene tightens my throat. A strong rush of affection threads hot through my skin, like I am standing too close to a bonfire. I want so badly to touch him; I stand there forever thinking about doing it. But I can't do this. I have to go somewhere, maybe the mall. Maybe I can find a girl, a simple uncomplicated affair that doesn't involve all this weird emotion.

This stuff, these emotions have been happening for a while and I think I've been lying to myself about them until yesterday. The night started out like so many Saturday nights: I go out with Josh to get some girls, I abandon him at some event, and later, if I remember to pick him up, he is there waiting for me and thankful to have me return and always forgiving (eventually). It has always worked for us, well, for me. But this time I didn't count on him not knowing never to touch the punch bowl at parties (at least until he is 21), especially a college party; he is so incredibly naive about these things. So I didn't expect to return to find him blasted drunk surrounded by all these older student smarties laughing and falling all over themselves with him like he was a funny version of Albert Einstein. You'd think that no one should be able to be able to carry off talking about the boring subjects he loves so much but yet he looked--_charming_ and everyone was so _interested_. It was like he didn't even care that I wasn't there with him. I felt all these strange emotions -- anger and jealousy about many things that suddenly seemed unfair, only I'm not sure what _was_ unfair and why I was so mad all of a sudden.

I couldn't take watching this Popular!Josh spectacle and feeling all the stomach weirdness so I just walked up to him and his crowd with a "_HEY_!" His friends did a little startled jump and watched at me while I stole a swig from the cup in Josh's hand. It was a pretty good cranberry juice and vodka mix, subtle but potent as all hell. "_You know you have an underage drinker at this party?_" I told the nearest smart college dude wearing a stupid plaid vest and expression of self righteousness. "_I can call the cops on your ass._"

"_Not my party,_" the smart guy shrugged as I pulled Josh up from the couch, I didn't think he had even recognized me yet.

_"You are going to get us in SUCH trouble for drinking all this vodka Josh!"_ I yelled at him squeezing his arm tighter so he wouldn't fall back down on the couch. "_What the HELL were you THINKING!"_ He looked at me for a few moments like he was trying to figure out who I was. Then recognition made him break out into a huge grin.

_"Drake!"_ he yelled. _"Hey, everyone this is my brother! I told you, his mom married -- my mom--no my dad?"_ He stopped like he forgot how we became brothers. I didn't care to tell them the story, I just dragged him out of there and back home.

Drunks are so god damn annoying. It was so hard getting him quietly up the stairs and then there was one point when he slumped down on me. The only reason he didn't make us both fall over altogether is that I got pressed against the door. He let gravity pin his body against mine and I could feel all of him, his shoulders, his stomach, his warm breath against my neck. Now, I have had countless awkward lectures from my mom and teachers and coaches on how never to take advantage of a girl when she is drunk or in some other vulnerable state, but never once did they say what to do when it is your stepbrother's lips on your neck. If you have seen them you'd understand my weakness. Those lips are rosy and full and always shaped into unintentional pout. I usually try not notice them because, really, if you dwelt on them too long they could break your heart. Or maybe it is just me being the a sick bastard that I am, cause when I see them I have this fantasy that is highly inappropriate: I want to grab his collar and suck his goddamn pretty lips into my mouth. Which is exactly what I ended up doing, and a whole lot more, so _much_ more.

And afterwords holding him I felt trusted and wanted and all together more useful than any other time in my life. I thought nothing could be better in this world than sleeping next to him every night, his knees behind mine, or feet rubbing together under the sheet. It was as close to pure happiness as I have ever felt.

But now it is daylight and I'm questioning it all. Yet I've turned down three girls because they aren't that tall broad shouldered unerring creature who, for some unknown reason, has stuck by my worthless ass for four years. And now that I know what that silly sweet face looks like all knotted up tight with ecstasy I can't stop _thinking _about it. I'm wanting him, wanting all of him more than any single person I've ever wanted. I feel all these crazy emotions that I do not want. I don't want this.

Dammit, when did Josh become that person who is now the center and endpoint of my life? When did it become "in love" rather than just "love". I'm _bad _at love because I don't want it. There are lots of people in the world who are good at love but I am one of the bad ones, and I'm not ready for it more than I'm not ready to be gay. Gay is the easy part, who gives a fuck about gay, it is the _loving _one person that is hard, and all the loss of freedom and vulnerability that go with it.

I have to tell him it was a mistake. He'll understand, maybe even be relieved.


	3. Drake Breaks his Heart

I drive home knowing he will be there waiting for me. And I do find him reading quietly on our couch and not looking very well. His face is so pale and the violet shadows beneath his eyes as thick as paint tell me his hangover isn't over. But despite whatever illness he may be feeling inside, he is looking at me with a lopsided grin that is so charming, and with an expression that as always so completely open. It makes me to run up to him and hold and protect him from all harm, to kiss his lips and neck and his eyelids shut.

_"I guess we need to talk," _he says a little nervously.

I open my mouth and say a stupid, _"About what?"_

We both laugh at this, but when we fall silent he adds with just the slightest edge to his voice, _"Come on, you know. I need to know how you feel about what happened last night, I need to know what you are thinking ... what it means for us."_

And I can't say it. I can't say anything.

He realizes I'm not going to make this easy so he pushes off of the couch and moves across the room, striding around and stopping in front of the window to face me. He clenches his fists, crossing them across his chest and turns his head in profile. I watch him close his eyes very slowly, very carefully then open them again to look at me in earnest.

I look right into that beautiful stare. His eyes often change color: in certain lights, and happy times, they are green, flecked with sky; at other times, like now, they are only the deepest purest blue. Whatever the color, they can never look anything but spectacular. I rock back into my heels from their intensity. I want to say _"Do it again. Lean against me again."_ His face is so full of hope and sweetness that for a moment, I can say that, say something good and true that will make him blush and break out into a smile and walk straight into my arms. I could leave one life and arrive onto the blissful next just like that.

But I can't open my mouth, I can't say it. The moment passes and I don't say anything.

I can't breathe. I can't breathe.

I can not think straight if I keep looking at him, so I will myself to look at the floor at little scratch mark on the wood. _"Dammit Josh, we were good as just brothers,"_ I say to my little mark on the floor. _"Why did you have to ruin everything?"_ I knew he'd take it the wrong way, but I didn't care, he did ruin it all by making me obsessively adore him and suddenly I resent him intensely for it. My words mean little or nothing to me, serving just as a screen to hide behind for a moment while I grab the power back from him.

There is silence for many painful heartbeats. I cautiously peer at him through my bangs and see no expression on his face--he is merely looking at me, absolutely quiet and calm behind still eyes. His once so readable face is sealing off, I can hear him shutting me out like locker doors in an empty hall slamming closed one by one, bang bang bang. There is a firmness in him that I had only seen once before, a cold dignity, serving as a warning of a past time when he was done with me. I should remember and heed it but I don't. And, suddenly, as if nothing has happened, he turns around, a little gallantry to the way he tosses his head. _"Dinner should be ready, we should go,"_ is all he says. He just leaves, just like that. I feel disarmed; he does not take me up on my challenge. So I have look down again because of the tears that are suddenly in my eyes. It hurts to get away with something I had no right to get away with; I shouldn't get away with what I had said. He should have punched me for being a lying coward like that.

During dinner he pretends to eat but I see he is just pushing food around. He smiles and even laughs a little and he totally fools our parents in a way that he never has before. But he doesn't look at me, he passes me a plate and answers any simple request, but he doesn't look at me.

I think he will forgive me though, give me time to get used to this, he'll be patient, he always is.

\--

_"Why did you have to ruin everything?"_

Here's the heartbreaker, Josh did not expect that. Who knows why he thought it would end up different, but he did. At first it feels like he has been shot and left with a great gaping bloody hole in his heart. Oh, he thinks, so that is why the heart analogy is used so often in love, because he feels what is left of his fall right out of him, splat on the wooden floors, irreparably shattering and spilling like a dropped egg. He waits for that empty pain inside to engulf him and make him sob, and he does feel a little ache pushing at the walls of his throat. But no tears come to him, he is dry all through. Instead he thinks that he should congratulate himself: he's had as much affection and happiness as a person like him can expect from someone like Drake who is so out of his league. He had no right to push for more, and in doing so he did ruin everything. It would be only a matter of time before Drake has sex with somebody else, a lot of somebody elses. And now he knows he won't be able to endure the stream of people that come in and out of those arms anymore. He can't. He braces himself for the full impact of this loss, but only this blank sensation remains. He hears a odd little hum in his ears and then somehow, miraculously, he successfully blocks all the pain away.

Drake finally looks up at him, and he thinks about how Drake's eyes are indescribably gorgeous -- a mix of honey, cobalt, chocolate colors that there is no name for, and expressive with anger and passion. Not passion for him, of course, but for life and the next person to make-out with. Oh how he will miss those eyes. He turns to leave and mumbles something about dinner. Drake does not come after him, he just lets him leave. Here is the end, he thinks to himself coldly, though it would, for him at least, be the beginning of something else.


	4. Leaving Home

Later, much later, Josh packs less than he expects to. He takes two T-shirts, two pants, handful of underwear and socks, one book, all of it fits into the backpack he uses for school. There is a Polaroid picture lying inside one of his drawers and he picks it up to look at it in the stream of light from a crack in the window shade. Somebody who looks like his dad only 20 years younger in a suit and tie is holding a pretty dark haired girl in white dress by the arm. Happiness is forever on the faces as they smile at the camera and think of the bright promise of a long future together. He drops the photo in the backpack not knowing why he wants to take it. The packing takes all of ten minutes.

It is after midnight, or very early morning, an occasional car moves by in still streets. Inside he hears only the quiet thuds of his shoes hitting the hardwood floor of the stairs, the clatter of keys he leaves for his stepbrother on the counter, and the swish of a refrigerator opening for last minute swills of juice that stings his empty stomach. He stops for a moment thinking he might throw up the juice like everything else he has swallowed this day, but the sensation passes and he hurries out of the house. The night sky is gauzy by a weak moon and his footsteps is the only sound in the neighborhood other than a barking dog excited by the rare pedestrian. The smell of the grass, the reflection of the sky in the gutters keep him from looking back at the hexagon window of the room he leaves behind.

It takes him an hour to reach the highway and an other hour to get a ride with a truck driver. The sky over the ocean is just beginning to purple and cover the world into a color and shape. He knows it is ridiculously dangerous to hitch hike at this hour but his ride has a big friendly tobacco-stained toothy smile and, more importantly, is headed north and he thinks that is a good destination. Only it isn't much of a truck, any other time he would have questioned its safety, then again any other time he would also be fearing muggers, meteors, drunk drivers and serial killers. Not today. The fan belt squeals and some smoke muddles out from back end when the driver starts it up again, but he is thankful for the rest. He leans against the window, feels the highway rolling by beneath the tires and listens to the faint sound the wind whistling past the cab of the truck. Through the rear-view window he looks back at the softening sky above the city he is leaving.

The driver is happy to have a passenger since he was having trouble staying awake, but it turns out the boy doesn't talk much. Or maybe the youngster is just shy. He does have the bluest eyes he's seen in a while and they look so sad, so sad that the driver thinks may be that is the reason the boy is so quiet.


	5. Gone

The next day I wake up and I am surprised by how quiet the room is. There are none of the familiar sounds of Josh's breathing or the rumpling of his comforter as he shifts in protest against the morning light. I sit straight up, look around and see nothing out of the ordinary. Josh's bed is made, his drawers neatly tucked in, and his shoes are in a row except for his running shoes, which are missing. The sofa is there and the big table with the computer is over there, as always, quiet in their curious composure. Even Oprah in her picture frame smiles placidly back at me.

But everything might as well be upside down and reversed because something feels wrong. The place is emptier and so hollow I can hear my heartbeat echo in it - thump-dump, thump-dump. I feel that Josh is gone. Gone. The word lodges in the back of my throat. Although I know that this can not be true, I feel a hopeless kind of urgency like a small child who has been left alone in an unfamiliar neighborhood.

I stumble out of my bed and grab my cell phone. Only three messages, one from an ex-girlfriend in denial and two from the girl at the mall yesterday. I can't even remember what either looks like. OK, he isn't gone, at the very least he would send me a "fuck you" message--no, Josh would never say that, he'd leave a heartfelt sorry note that would make me feel like I beat up on a puppy. I'm being silly, he wouldn't leave with a month of school left, he hasn't even picked the college he is going to yet.

But I don't see him in school. People keep asking me if he is sick or somewhere and each time it is like they are punching me in the gut because for the first time_ I don't know_. I start to bump up against everything--lockers, tables, people. _"You OK?" _classmates ask. Funny how all their faces take on a supremely cruel and indifferent quality when I'm here in the midst of a personal crisis. I am an absolute wreck, though now I'm trying try to assume a cool pose against the window because I am sure Josh will appear any second around the corner and I don't want to look insane.

But I am insane because coming out of the hallway I hear Ben Folds from an iPod sing _"I will consider you GONE"_, then not two seconds later Violent Femmes _"Gone Daddy GONE"_. Yet it seems no matter how hard the cosmos are trying to tell me he _is_ gone, I still can not get through my head. Impossible! He wouldn't just leave.

After school I start frantically dialing his cell. It rings and rings and skips voice mail. Where the fuck is he? I call his work, no one has heard from him. Maybe he was in an accident? I have visions of him lying on a hospital kept alive by some support system that might be disconnected any minute because no one is around to identify him. He would die not knowing how much I loved him. I didn't know whether I should cry or explode from this chaos of not knowing.

After school I run frantically inside the house, up to our room making a reconnaissance sweep and then back downstairs. The house just booms with his absence. I find my mom holding a casserole dish and Walter looking for something in the hall closet. _"You boys are on your own for dinner today,"_ my mother so casually tells me. _"Your dad and I are driving to Carlsbad and---."_

_"NO!"_ I yell breathing heavily as I extend out my palm to stop her. _"You can't. You have to help me find Josh. He's gone. Gone!"_

She looks at me curiously, _"Oh honey, he'll show up soon and we have--."_

_"You don't understand,"_ I'm almost crying at this point, running my hand frantically through my hair. My delicate hold on sanity is beginning to buckle. _"He ran away, he's left. I know it, I _feel_ it!"_

Walter laughs behind me._ "Josh? Run away?" _He snorts. _"Oh come on, he gives us an itinerary when he goes to the grocery store." _But something he reads in my face makes him stop laughing. _ "Look, I prove it to you that he is at the library sulking from whatever you did this time, I usually find him there." _ He reaches in his pocket at pulls out his cell phone and punches a icon. It takes a moment for me to realize what he is doing.

_"Oh my god Walter! You have him on a GPS?" _ I am angry and happy at the same time.

_"Originally just you, but after that helicopter incident I put him on the account too,"_ Walter replies, still scrolling at his phone. _ "I know you think it is an invasion of privacy, but you two have become entirely too --" _ Something he sees on the phone screen make him stops mid-sentence.

_"What is it dear?"_ mom asks.

I snatch the phone from Walter and look at the map. _ "According to this --he's near Santa Cruz and still moving!" _ I stare in wonder at the little human icon that is Josh. _"That's like 300-400 miles from here." _ I add quietly doing the math to figure out how fast I could catch up.

_"What are we going to do? We have to get him!"_ my mom is finally suitably frantic.

_"I'll go after that son of --" _Walter grabs his jacket from the open closet. He looks furious, but I'm angrier.

_"Not you, ME. I have to be the one. He's 18 now, and I know he won't come back unless I'm the one that talks to him."_

_"But I'm his FATHER."_

Confusion and exasperation seep between us like a judgmental fourth person. I glare at Walter, I don't understand why I'm suddenly so angry at him. Some father, I think, before he married my mom he just put Josh in one camp after another and never took the time for him. Instead of growing bitter Josh became the über-perfect son and it still wasn't enough; after they joined my family it was just Josh and me, always, taking care of each other. And now, after what I said, Josh has no one; he is all alone.

_"But I know him BEST."_ My tone is mild, but I know the words cut through to them.


	6. Engelbert

The driver's name is Engelbert Valerio. His mother had been a big fan of Engelbert Humperdinck in the early sixties when he was born. He only introduces himself to Josh as "Brutus" since no one under forty understands his real name, and he never likes to give out real names anyway. Plus he hates the name Engelbert. In return his young hitchhiker tells Brutus open and honestly, _"I'm Josh Nichols from San Diego."_ He then smiles and adds a "_Nice to meet you Brutus."_ The boy does not seem startled or bothered by what Bert knows is his very menacing disheveled appearance. He glances at himself in the rear-view mirror to make sure he hasn't changed. Black tendrils still grow long and wiry from his eyebrows and bristly gray hairs continue to appear hard and uneven on his cheeks and chin. His belly remains hard and round, and gray hair sprout furry above the neck of his white undershirt. Thick veins pulse like worms in this temples and his hands on the steering wheel. These not-handsome looks earned him the code name "Brutus" after the bad guy in the Popeye cartoon. Brutus is far better name than Engelbert he thinks.

The roads are now full of morning commuters and the sun streams through the dirty windshield catching and revealing faint raccoon tracks and water stains on the glass. The boy had tried to sleep but now is quietly staring at the California landscape along Highway 5. Nothing much to look at but miles of road, scrub and mountains that gray and flatten in the distance like the jagged edge of beaten steel. It reminds Brutus that the knife in his boots need sharpening. Either boredom or troubled thoughts make Josh turn to Brutus and start asking questions. _"So what do you do Brutus? Why are you headed to San Jose?_

The boy asks with a voice that is soft and self effacing. His head, slightly down to one side, has an abstract and considerate expression as if he expects Brutus to answer him back with some great respected career. His full lipped mouth, heavy dark lashes and pale boyish face give him a vulnerability Brutus can't put his finger on. It is some hopeless melancholy that reminds him of his ex-wife. Suddenly it didn't seem right to him a boy his age wandering around this strip of highway alone, getting picked up at night. _"How old are you kid?"_

Josh reaches for his wallet and pulls out his license. Another incredibly trustful thing to do, Brutus can see the cash in the folds. He also sees on the license Josh holds up that the name matches and age makes him no longer a minor. The goofy face in the license, however, only slightly resembles the boy with him now. _"That barely looks like you."_ Brutus says turning his attention back to the highway.

Josh looks thoughtfully at his picture for a few moments. _"Yes, I know. This is a few years old."_ He lifts himself up off the seat to push the wallet back in his back pocket. _"I turned eighteen four months ago. No worries, I'm not a runaway."_

Brutus relaxes a little and starts talking because he needs to stay awake, but also because the boy seems so interested, like he is writing a high school paper on California crime. He doesn't tell him the truth exactly--that he is nothing better than a drug mule--but he does say he hasn't had much luck getting normal jobs and his little transport company helps pay the bills.

Josh asks what he transports, and Brutus answers vaguely, _"Oh anything, any material that can fit into the back of this no good truck."  
_

Brutus keeps talking, about his failed marriage, various jobs and that one prison spell, about a son that must be twenty by now who he barely knows. It is so easy to talk to someone that appears not to judge him based on appearances or jobs. Josh's face has a quiet, watchful look about it as he listens, until he smiles, he has the kindest smile Brutus has ever seen. It renews his faith in people just a little.

When they pull into a roadside diner Brutus offers to buy him dinner, and after several back-in-forths Josh agrees. Brutus spreads his yellow toothed smile, then takes a swig from his Coke can, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and says, _"OK, let's eat some pork sandwiches kid!"_ before opening the truck door. He drags one big leg at a time out of the truck before walking into the parking lot.

_"Never had those! Sound great!"_ Josh laughs for the first time as he exits the truck after him. Then stops to think, looks at his backpack and yells, _"Hey Brutus, I'm just going to throw this in the cab."_ He trots to the back of the truck and opens the covered bed latch. Brutus had forgotten to lock it, he slips up that way a lot. He regrets the error now when he turns to see Josh's face. He didn't even have time to yell stop.

Josh stares at the open truck bed, his backpack hanging limply from his hand._ "My god Brutus, is this what I think it is?"_

Josh has no idea how vulnerable he is. His innocence is kind and refreshing and Brutus wants to suppress the need to destroy it as quickly as possible.


	7. Drake Drives

I could sense the relief in mom and Walter that I would be the one to take care of things. Josh had acted so uncharacteristically rash that they didn't know what to do. They knew I could either solve the problem or make things worse, so they gambled on those odds until they were able to file a Missing Adult Report with the police. Mom gave me the keys to the Walter's SUV and the 'spy' cellphone only after urging me to wait and rest, to keep calling, to not to drive tonight. I resented their lack of urgency.

Josh's drastic departure shook me out of my narcissistic haze and made me pay attention. Josh had chosen not to continue in my shadow, not to live the life we had; he wanted more. I could not hate him for that decision since I had forced him into it. It must have taken tremendous strength to sever the ties so completely, or perhaps plain foolishness. If only he didn't feel he had to risk his academic future and leave his family. Did he really feel so much for me? Of course he did. We existed in our own little world of two for so long, reluctant to allow anyone else to make any claim on either one of us into our circle. We shared thoughts, secrets, hopes, fears; we confided in each other. We wanted so much from each other and were only just starting to figure out how to get it before I blew it. Our connection was so fierce and now the is hurt is so huge I have no words for it.

_"Calm down"_, I tell myself as I speed down the highway. I know I made a terrible mistake and now will have to confront coolly and logically the consequences. I remember what Josh would say to me during in Algebra study sessions--_Forget the score on the last test and think only about the solution for the problem in the present, the now._ For a moment, I can almost hear his voice over hum of the AC and the freeway noise. Jesus I'm going crazy, but I will have a solution for our lives together ready for him, I'll throw away my old tired fears and mistakes and forge a new life for us. I promise. He will listen to me.

I'm hitting afternoon traffic and cursing at every car in front of me. But along with each press of the accelerator, each highway sign I see, each car I pass I am also thinking of Josh. He is always next to me in the truck, like a weight, a regret, a gentle presence, my huge despair. I miss him fiercely. I find myself arguing with him in my head. I ask him what he thinks about this idea or that plan. I tell him we will work this out, I am a fool, I am idiot, and we will work this out. Please listen me.

After the I am over the Transverse Range mountains and through the Tejon Pass, I stop for coffee. I swallow the stale black water and hover over the magazines. Kristen Stewart and her vampire boyfriend grin at me from one of the covers as if they know I am a big weany coward. I wonder if Josh stopped at this same convenience store and looked over this same magazine. I pull out the cellphone and study the Josh icon on the phone map. He's lingering just north of San Jose somewhere, so I'm catching up! I wonder if he is on a bus, or god forbid hitchhiking--no he would never do that. Ridiculous. He knows mad men are unusually drawn to him; when we'd go into the city psychotic strangers would come bounding up to him like he was their buddy, shouting psychotically, shaking his hand and putting their arms around him and frightening us both. Josh would try to give them money before I could drag him away.

The clerk at the register is bored to the point of surliness. Maybe this guy remembers seeing Josh, so I wonder how I would describe him to the clerk. I could say Josh is tall, about six feet, and unusually nice and polite -- he would have said the only_ "Thank you very much!"_ the clerk had heard all day. And Josh's hair is black, not brown black, but really dark and it curls up at the ends. His skin is white, so very pale and smells like rosemary soap and tastes like crushed almonds when you lick it. And surely the clerk remembers something so perfect about how Josh's curved upper lip and pouty lower one fit together. He is all of these characteristics and some indefinable thing that makes your eyes glaze over and your body want to do all sorts of interesting things to him in the dark.

_"Are you going to pay for that or just stand there?"_ the surly clerk snaps at me. I know he wants to add _"like an idiot"._

_"You are getting paid to just stand there no matter what I do right?" _I bark back frowning at him for having interrupted my fantasy. I throw the dollars down with unnecessary force. I'm not the nice and polite one buster.

Back on the road I drive with a caravan of mostly trucks transporting everything from large equipment, onions or tomatoes, and those types of green vegetables I never eat and don't know the name of. The pain and pressure of being alone in the middle of this horrible stretch of highway starts to wear me down. I reach for my companion, the cell phone with the Josh icon. I glance at it for comfort and see no image. No icon. God dammit Josh's phone is off! I yell _NO_ at the contraption and look up just in time to see the back of that truck coming towards me, that truck with all those vegetables I hate. Shit.


	8. Life of Crime

_"Get back into the truck."_

Josh's throat contracts, his voice shaky,_ "But Brutus you said--and these are two bales of--?"_

_"Just get back in-the-truck." _Brutus punctuates the last three words with an emphatic fist.

Josh gulps as if to say something else but no other words escape from him. In the flat expanse of the parking lot Brutus is the biggest thing he's seen that doesn't run on wheels. He scurries back in the truck.

Brutus has trouble turning the engine, it coughs and moans like an old man seized by emphysema. Once it starts he drives steadily. Ahead of them the blacktop looks endless and mysterious, Josh is not sure it is leading him to his death or a new life. He keeps Brutus in the corner of his vision biding his time waiting for them not feel dangerous to each other.

Those bales of marijuana wake Josh from the daze he had been in for the last day. He had been so afraid to feel any emotion that he cloaked all the recent events so tightly within him to render them fiction. Those disappointments remained only a small ache in the back of his mind, no larger than a freckle. Only when he had dozed a little did his chest grip in paroxysms of pain and he needed help to return to his self-imposed amnesia. Talking to Brutus and learning about his life had taken up the space in his thoughts that would have otherwise been occupied by sadness and guilt.

How kind Brutus had seemed to him a hundred more miles back. Although big and menacing, Brutus's weary expression made him look like he just hadn't had a good hug in years. Their commaderie had given Josh a rush of adventure, as if he were playing the part of some cool counterculture hitchhiker in search of the real America with a trucker on the path of hard knocks and redemption. After this ride he'd continue to shake off his suburban bourgeois and forge ahead to his new life--hobnobbing with diamond in the rough outcasts like washed-up rockers still loving the music, or hookers with hearts of gold.

But his predisposition for bad luck had followed him from San Diego. He now knows Brutus is not the former felon leading a redemptive life. Josh sighs and leans his head back. He isn't disappointed and he isn't angry, he is just tired of hoping for the best in people and being constantly wrong. He tries to hate Brutus but can't even summon up any strong dislike. He is still fond of the ole crook, still has faith in him. Josh knows he will keep old Brutus's crime a secret. Even though his mind writhes with endless questions and disappointments, he would not rat on Brutus even if he gets strapped in a folding chair with a bare light bulb shining in his eyes. Just like he will always love Drake despite having his heart crushed and pureed by him, he is never going to give up liking most people.

He draws another deep breath and looks at himself for the first time in the reflection of the glass in the dimming light. He is surprised by a face that is sad and lost as though he has missed a train and is too stupid to know where to go or what to do.

_"Beat me up or kill me just for being the biggest idiot on the planet."_ Josh mumbles wearily. _"Not because I'm some kind of witness, I would never tell the police on you."  
_

Brutus regards him with a blink, _"What the hell do you mean?"  
_

_"Because I'm still hoping that you'll live that clean life you said you were doing. That you'll meet up and be a father to your son even though he's all grown. That you'll -- well, I want to give you the chance to still do that." _He crosses his arms and watches the fields roll past, telephone poles and road signs almost frozen by their speed. _"And I'm so tired of being the idiot, I can't go on like this anymore. I'm just so tired."_ He last words fade into the air between them.

Brutus slows the truck down, signals and pulls to the side of the road. He slouches in the drivers seat and sits quietly for a long time.

It is just after sunset and there is a streak of bluish green at the horizon. Cars and trucks roar past and shudder the whole vehicle. Each time the truck is filled with the rush of headlights, their intrusion only emphasizes the strange intimacy of the small space and the two them with in it. Josh waits, stealing glances at Brutus' expression which seems a little mournful to him but not mean, more like a sad clown with air of weary wisdom.

_"Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a decent job when you are a two time felon Josh?"_ he finally asks. Josh shakes his head.

_"Every place you go you are treated as an untrustworthy person -- a potential thief, drug addict, or murder,"_ Brutus says._ "And you know what? When you see that in people's eyes, you begin to feel less trustworthy yourself, like it must be true no matter how hard you don't want it anymore. Everywhere you go you are constantly reminded of your lowly position compared to everyone else, so you just think you might has well stay there."_

Josh thinks it is a good eulogy for all that the derelicts given a bad break in life - unfortunate births, callow youthful spirits. _"I didn't think that of you,"_ he says quietly without the sense that he is communicating anything remarkable.

_"I know you didn't Josh, I know you didn't."_ Brutus then moves closer puts his arm across Josh's shoulder like an old war buddy. _"I need to drop off this cargo in Oakland, but afterwards we'll eat and talk some more OK?"_

_"You mean you aren't going to kill me?"_

_"Naw, I like you Josh. But I got to finish this job then I can take you wherever you want to go."_

Up until that point Josh wanted to keep going; it had not been a conscious decision but rather letting inertia drive him away from his problems. But now he knows where he had been subconsciously heading towards. _"Where I need to go is only about five or so miles past Oakland."_

Ten minutes later Josh is waiting for Brutus on a dark disreputable block somewhere in Oakland, at a section that includes an adult video store, a closed discount emporium and a small market with a 7-11 sign painted over. On the other side of the street trash clutters the curb along the side of some brown brick housing project where people are outside on their front stoops and wandering around the streets in a half hazard fashion. He feels as out of place as a cat in a dog show._ "Please hurry Brutus" _he says to himself rubbing his arms. He is unaccustomed to the Bay Area's chilly weather even in late spring.

A man wearing about four coats stumbles near him. He is brown skinned with eyes the steeliest of blue, intelligent but mad. _"Spare change?"_ he asks Josh. When Josh pulls a dollar out of his wallet and guitar pick flies out and is taken adrift by an unexpected marine gust. As it twists and spins in the wind like a leaf he thinks back to when he found the pick on the living room floor only two days ago and intended to return it to Drake. When it lands and twitters precariously on the edge of the gutter he looks away so he doesn't have to watch it fall in and disappear.

He hears the familiar cough of the emphysemic truck and runs toward the sound.


	9. Crash

What happens is the usual dumb thing that happens sometimes while you are driving along, just driving along deep in thought, and then suddenly you hear the voices of the road and tire meeting and shrieking. I don't know how I manage to swing the big SUV from right to left and back and thump off the road so quickly without causing the big monstrosity to roll over. The median ditch stops me with a jolt that should have catapulted me towards the windshield if not for my seat-belt. The air bags do not deploy so I hit my forehead hard on the steering wheel.

When everything is over and quiet I wait for the some distant pronouncement of my death, but when that does not come my heart starts pumping in panic wondering if I just don't feel any lower pain because I've been severely injured. I touch my finger tips to my forehead registering that there are no big leaks which also reassures me also that I have use of my hands. I wiggle my toes and happy to feel the inside of my shoes. For the next few minutes, hoping to calm the rush of blood through my veins, I start to sing the lyrics to a song I've been trying to write. My heart is beating up in my throat, but the creative process helps me keep my cool.

_"Sir? Are you OK?"_ a voice outside is asking me. With difficulty I open the door and someone leads me to a spot on the green embankment and I am made to sit.

_"I'm fine..."_ I say. _"Just give me a moment then I got to head out again."_

_"You aren't going anywhere in that car right now,"_ this someone says. I look up and see the SUV's two back tires are flat.

I spit out every curse word I know._ "S***! F***! God D*** it! **** ****** *****!!"  
_

_"He looks familiar,"_ a different voice says from behind.

_"I think he is one of those Jonas brothers,"_ answers a female voice.

That makes me turn around. The woman has a dropped face like a week-old jack-o-lantern. _"Oh please...aren't you a little past the tween Jonas stage?"_ I snap letting some of my anger off on her. _"I'm definitely NOT a Jonas or Abraham Lincoln."_

_"I wonder if he was a jerk before the accident."_

The air is suddenly full of whirling colors of red and blue and an officer of the law appears. The small crowd steps back. He says so many things I ignore as I feel to make sure my cell phones are OK in my breast pocket. The officer continues to talk while writing me a ticket. He sounds like a dog barking in the distance. The only words I hear are _"These boys are going to take you to the hospital to get checked out. Do you understand?"_

I nod. _"Yes, but I'm fine." _I watch a wrecker drive effortlessly into the median. Then man gets out and attaches a hook to the backside of Walter's car. The SUV's end lifts like it is getting an incredible wedgie. I feel sad watching it get towed away.

They put me in the back of an ambulance and I get to sit up like a regular passenger. At the hospital doctor a picks and sorts through my body with lights and instruments while I fidget. _"Any difficulty breathing? Nausea? Mhmm, good." _She convinces me to stay overnight for observation, can't be too careful with a bump on the head I suppose. I can only think about getting the new tires and back on the road in the morning.

When I'm finally I'm alone in a hospital bed I flip open, flip close, and flip open Walter's cell. The little Josh icon does not reappear. Then I open my own cell and dial Josh's number. I wait for the beep but when it comes instead of the careful speech I had rehearsed in my head I just hang up and sigh back into my pillow.

This night is going to be hard, I'm not used to sleeping without him. We often had our most interesting conversations laying in the dark before we fell asleep. And even when we were quiet Josh and I could feel each other's proximity and knew instinctively when the other was awake and needed the other. We could talk about things there we would never dream is talking about at any other time or in front of anyone else. Even when we were quarreling over all kinds of little things during the day, we were confiding in each other at night. Sometimes it was just simple talk and our laughter would just surge throughout our room causing Megan to come tell us to shut up. What fun we had. He didn't know despite all the girls and friends that I was really lonely, and our shared intimacy felt like pure release.

What if I never find him? What if he died or something? I begin to cry, long, broken little noises until some old man I didn't know was behind a curtain yells at me to shut the hell up and quit being so fucking dramatic.


	10. Berkeley

Brutus seems to know the city; he drives them to the only open restaurant on a commercial strip that perhaps may be a lively business lunchtime area during the day, but at night is sealed and chained from the dark undesirables until sunlight. Brutus lays a friendly hand on the Josh's shoulders and guides him into the restaurant. There is a jukebox blaring inside as some older people play pool on some battered tables in a room off to the side. Leaning on the long bar, Josh studies a menu written in chalk on the wall and orders the only meal name he recognizes. After ordering, Brutus finds a booth with a nice view of the city. From where they sit Josh sees the pinpoints of distant electric lights on the mountainsides. Each light, he imagines, is a happy cozy home with a nice normal family—certainly none house a freakish son that slept with his stepbrother. Brutus is happily eating his meal and talking between bites. Josh wonders how long Brutus is going to want his company. When he will be dropped off one of those dark orange-lit corners alone? Until then, Josh decides to cling to him like a life jacket.

_"I wasn't a bad kid when I went to prison the first time."_ Brutus says, reiterating his tale of woe, _"Prison didn't reform me to a good kid, it just introduced me to even more dangerous criminals, a network of them. They all got me into bigger jobs."  
_

Fluorescent lights flicker over their heads and those of a few solitary diners who sit scattered at empty tables. _"When I was in prison for a night, I met Bludge,"_ Josh says. "_He went clean after his parole. He now runs a successful import/export business with a few ex-cons. He changed his life, maybe I can hook you two up? Maybe he can get you work?"  
_

Brutus almost chokes on his meal. _"You? In prison?"_ He starts with hesitant little half-laughs, like he is trying to spare Josh's feelings, but ends with a hearty guffaw. He grasps Josh's chin and turns his face slowly from one side to the other as if he is trying to imagine some other type of person sitting across from him. Then he affectionately slaps Josh's cheek. _"Guess I misjudged you kid."  
_

Josh winces and rubs the side of his face. He wonders what is it about his cheeks that makes people want to manhandle and slap them. _"Yea, I've had a few run-ins with the law--thanks to my brother." _He doesn't elaborate; saying the word 'brother' makes his stomach lurch. It seems strange to say the word aloud now. _"I can help you stay clean, get a better connection. You have to try!"  
_

Brutus reaches for the plastic cream cups and pours three cupfuls into his coffee, no sugar, _"Yea, maybe. But first we have to get some sleep; a friend of mine has a place he lets me crash when I'm in town. In the morning I'll drop you off in Berkeley, and then we'll meet up again in a few days. Just one more job and then we'll see. OK?"_ After watching Josh nod and smile a boyish grin with so much hope, he adds, _"Anyone you should call to say your OK? Your family? You mentioned a brother?"  
_

Josh has yet to touch his food. The pizza slice is still sitting in its plate in front of him. He takes a bite and chews slowly. After a moment of chewing, he pauses, his hand holds a fork still, and his eyes drift out onto the mountains again. _"No--no one is expecting a call from me."_ Josh tries to keep the pain out of his voice, but it leaks out the end of his sentence like sharp tiny splinters. Brutus, if he notices, chooses to ignore it.

Josh had listened to the few messages he received early in the afternoon: two from Drake asking why he skipped school, and one vague one from his step-mom. Since then his cell phone had been so quiet, and its light so callously unblinking, he turned it off. Its silence, their unconcern, had been too much to bear. Or perhaps no one had noticed his absence yet, or in the case of Drake, feels nothing but overwhelming relief that he is gone. So no, there is no reason to call anyone.

They are both quiet for several minutes. Brutus appears to be thinking something over, then gives a Josh a big, open-mouthed ketchup and steak smile._ "Let's just go and hit the hay now kid. I'm beat."  
_

Brutus' friend's apartment is a studio in an elderly high rise next to a lake and park. No one is home, so Brutus goes through five keys on his ring before he can unlock it. Looking around in the darkness Josh can't decide what colors the walls are, some putty beige freckled with stains that look like age spots. The wall-to-wall carpeting might be tan but some dark brown patches were scattered all over it. Brutus points Josh to a couch with an itchy looking afghan before collapsing on only a marginally more comfortable-looking bed.

Josh undresses to his jockey shorts and lies on the couch. The room is cold--the whole city is much colder than he expected, but he is too tired to find another blanket. There are also cigarette burns the couch arms and an acrid smell of sweat and tobacco emanating from the pillows. He keeps listening to Brutus constant speech, now he is talking about his son again. The words keep him from thinking too much about the strangeness of his situation. But soon Brutus is breathing lightly and slowly with the glow from some outside lights coming through the crack in the curtain.

With the absence of Brutus running commentary Josh starts to tremble, he is not sure from cold or fear. He hears something that sounds like a rat moving over the wooden shelves in the kitchen. He hears the clatter of tiny claws then stillness and then the tiny of clatter of tiny claws again. He cannot close his eyes without envisioning a giant rat on his chest. Looking out into the darkness of the strange little room he begins to feel homesick. He thinks of his stepmother putting the dinner plates the dishwasher in the warm yellow kitchen, and of his father watching TV from the comfy living room couch. He thinks of his upstairs room with its deep angles in the ceiling, the colorful decals of license plates surrounding his big bed. He tries not to think of his brother's voice soothing and comforting in a song when he had trouble sleeping. Drake. If his thoughts went to Drake he'd start crying and never stop.

He swings his legs of the couch and walks to a window that looks out unto the lights of innumerable buildings below in the distance. He sees a bay that stretches below a blanket of ghostly fog, and the red and white lights of a plane floating and blinking complacently in the night sky. Then he sees it; he leans against the windowpane for a better view. It is there--the distant lights of what may be the campanile of the university in Berkeley. The place where his mother, his real mother, lived and studied.

He is suddenly filled with her motherly voice. _"Oh honey I'm so proud!"_ she would say taking both cheeks in her hand and looking to his eyes. She was so happy when he brought home a good mark. She loved everything he did. Her voice was kind and loving and when he was surrounded by her he felt safe and warm.

When he was ten years old he had refused to believe she died. Instead, he thought the hospital had snatched her away and just refused to give her back.

Eight years later he still hopes for her ghost, or guardian angel. Perhaps something like that will be there for him if he just walks the same streets she did and looks up at the same buildings she saw. Maybe, just maybe, going to Berkeley, the one person who loved him unconditionally would heal him.

He goes back to the couch and lies on his side in the darkness and listens to the plunk plunk of water hitting the shower drain until morning.


	11. Stuck Somewhere in Central California

You will not believe the morning I am having. First, there isn't a doctor free to release me, even though I'm eighteen and legal and ready to sign any waiver to get out of this stupid hospital. And the nurses here treat me like the librarians at school do--with as much apathy and contempt as possible without being openly rude. _"A doctor will see you soon"_ they tell me through gritted teeth.

Also there is the issue of Walter's SUV. The auto shop is telling me that I bent something along with destroying two tires. I'm a guy and I should know what they are saying but all I hear is _"Dented front something blah blah two days blah."_ I call a few car rental agencies but no one rents a car to someone under twenty-six years of age. Yes, I can get blown up in a foreign country for the good USA but I can't rent a car. Which wouldn't be too much of a problem but mom and Walter confiscated my fake IDs months ago.

My hospital roommate is sullen and full of frowns after listening to a morning of me yelling into the phone and demanding a doctor. He's been complaining to the nurses about how how he is needs private room and not a cramped space with some loud teenager. Now I hear him darkly muttering something to himself but I only recognize a word or two coming through now and then. He is all _"grumble kill grumble grumble teen grumble"._

What I want even more than anything is to talk to Josh, together we would figure things out--or at least have an adventure trying. I want this so much and the need is rushing into me all at once and I miss the goofball so sharply that I grow dizzy and have to lie back down on the bed. The only way I can only make sense of everything I have to do to get out of the hospital in the middle of nowhere California is the way I made sense of everything in our crazy lives since we first met--by confiding and doing it with you Josh, but you are not here. You are not here.

How silly my panic and fear of a few days ago seems to me now. Undressing each other, caressing his skin, holding him close, coming--- it was all just a natural extension of our intense bond. And now I feel like something absolutely vital has been forcibly taken from me. Taken? Who am I kidding? I obliterated it myself. It is this knowledge that breaks the last piece of my heart.

I draw a deep breath and think again of the task at hand. I will fix this. I will. I will. I pick up my cellphone and start dialing.

_"Drake? Is that you? I've tried to call a few times--"_

_"Yea, it's me. Mom, I need you to rent a car for me. The SUV's got some engine trouble that will take a few days to fix."_ I'm not really lying, I'm just leaving out the parts about how the engine got in trouble.

_"Did you wreck it? Are you OK? Where are you?"_ Oh my mom is so on to me most of the time.

_"No time to explain, I need a car. I'm afraid if I waste two days everything will be worse."_ This is my way of telling her now is not the time to be a Mom. I really need a car and I need it now.

I hear her sigh through the line and then some paper rustling as she looks for something to write with. _"I've been trying to call Josh this morning but his phone is off. Do you have any idea where he is?"_

A strange fear unlike anything I have ever experienced continues to sprout in my chest, taking root there, growing. I get up and walk to the window, but there is nothing to see but parked cars, an idling ambulance and a sprinkler ticking as it rotates, misting a small patch of grass. I put my fingers to the glass and they hum with a small vibration. _"I don't know, yet. I'm just heading to the last place he had his phone turned on."_

Sensing the fear in my voice my mom tells me not to worry, soon they'll be able file a missing person report, hire a detective, or maybe Josh will cool off and show up back at home. None of it helps me feel better. Mom sees it nothing more than a straightforward quarrel between us, but this is so much bigger. And I can only think of Josh out on the highway carrying with him his enormous empathy, his silly insistence that the world play fair. He would never allow injustice to happen in front of him. I have seen the color rush to his cheeks over nothing, breaking up fights that weren't his, trying to save the world one person at a time. It is a sweet but gaping weakness in him, a profound vulnerability that I knew someone would take advantage of.

I try not to worry. He could find a nice person that might help him along the way. But you just don't encounter such niceness from strangers that often, unless they're selling something or have a hard on.

"_You know how Josh is, Mom."_ I say, _"The sooner I find him the better."_

She is quiet for a while. I know she is thinking about Josh. _"Give me the name of the nearest car rental. I'll have you a car in thirty minutes."_


	12. Weird Engelbert

At the point where Josh gives up the notion of a good night sleep, he finally dozes off. He dreams he is in a river, but he does not try to swim or float, instead he lets the current carry him under like a rock. He opens his eyes and mouth and lets the water fill him up, then he wakes up thickly, partly still attached to the dream. He stares up to find Brutus standing above him cross-armed, simply watching him. For a moment Josh thinks he is the river's Grim Reaper and he bolts upright so quickly that he stumbles off the couch. He lies stunned on the floor and blinks up at Brutus, who appears so tall that he feels like he is lying beneath a giant redwood tree.

Brutus reaches down and pulls him up effortlessly. _"Get up boy, it's late. Did you have a bad dream?"_ he asks.

Josh feels an odd urge to run to the front door then bolt for his life. Brutus is standing so close that Josh notices a pale sickle-shaped scar intersecting his eyebrow, and smells sweat and leather and just the faintest edge of aftershave. _"Um, yes, I think so--yeah bad."_ Josh sputters.

Brutus grins and points his thumb to his left. _"There is a shower you are free to use."_

_"T-thanks."  
_

Brutus steps back to let him pass. Josh picks up his clothes and looks around the room. In the daylight he can see the room better: there are no lived-in touches, no pictures, no decorations. He can't picture the person who owns the apartment. He walks toward the bathroom then glances back once to see if Brutus is following him, but he is still standing, now looking down at the empty couch. Inside the bathroom he considers locking the door but the latch is old and probably noisy and he didn't want to offend Brutus. His politeness, he knew his stepbrother always felt, would his downfall.

He likes Brutus but danger seems to lurk close behind him, and he could not tell if his feelings were fatherly, sinisterly or something else. But without him where would he had slept last night? And later, when they parted, what if he didn't get work, or go to school, or figure out what to do? He did not know another person in the area and his ineptness could lead him to a quick fall. In a few months he could be like the homeless he saw last night: bearded and stinking, wearing five coats while pushing a shopping cart down the streets haranguing people about the government putting a spy microchip in his brain. He can't help but wonder what Drake would think of Brutus. But who is he kidding? Drake hated every one of his friends, even the nice normal non-felon ones. Yet Drake was always better at reading people's intentions, he had a natural street-smartness to him. He begins to desperately wish for his stepbrother's presence but quickly pushes the thought away before his throat tightens. He is only able to function with the help of some kind of flat rock that has lodged itself in his chest and blocks him from thinking anymore deeply about what had happened, what is happening, to him.

He steadies his breathing and looks up at the plaster peeling away from the light fixture mounted in the center of the ceiling. The fixture appears to have been the place where bugs of every kind once hung out before dying in mass together. At least the shower trickles warm water on his tired body; he cups the water in his hands and he is just starting to relax when there's the creak of a door. The dark mass of Brutus appears on the other side of the frosted glass doors of the bath, like immortal figure in a fog. The hot water is already starting to run out but he doesn't move, he waits.

_  
"I don't think you should go to Berkeley," _the now familiar rough voice of Brutus vibrates through the glass. _"I have a place in Truckee you can stay indefinitely, beautiful, secluded, doesn't even have cell reception--good place to heal. "_

_"What makes you think I need healing?"  
_

Brutus breathes out a chuckle. _"Whoever hurt you, will likely hurt you again--at least that has been my experience. In Truckee we'll drink hard and just look out at more stars you'll ever see around here. I'll help you forget whoever soon enough."  
_

Josh is unsure, but physically unable to tell someone so much older than him definitely no, if only because his parents had trained him too well._ "OK, maybe -- but after Berkeley. I really need to go there."_

_"Fair enough." _Though he sounds a little exasperated.

Josh sees an arm rise from the muted mass, Brutus is holding up an object._ "I got your cell phone number. I'll keep in touch. Two days."_

\--

Oh how the mighty have fallen, I say to myself when the salesman shows me the car mom rented for me. I have a beautiful babe-magnet 1968 Camaro SS sitting on the driveway back home, an awesome machine that has brought me hours of pleasure flying me through the coastal highway. And now I'm reduced to driving a geeking Prius through endless miles of blacktop between godforsaken cow patty fields.

My forehead is puffy and blue one day after the accident and I can not help but poke at it, each time causing me a jolt of pain. I am so angry at Josh for putting me in this situation, in pain and in a Prius. For a moment I think _"let him try to live without me, let him try to live in the streets being such a big wus". _Then I flip open Walter's phone and see that Josh has turned on his cell--and he is in Oakland. _Oakland_! I grin slowly. It all makes sense, I know exactly where he is heading. The bugger isn't getting away from _me_.

The Prius has a fun little camera in the back so I can drive backwards all around the parking lot and out into the main road while looking forward at a cute little screen. Back on the freeway I am still smiling, and thinking how Josh always said I only drive at two speeds, dangerously fast and _really_ dangerously fast.


	13. The Squirrel

_"This is amazing!"_ Josh says as they exit the truck at busy urban corner. Stands along the sidewalk display all kinds of merchandise for sale: crocheted hats, tie-dyed T-shirts, flowery soaps, handmade jewelry, henna tattoos. People are everywhere, and each of them look incredibly normal and odd at the same time.

Brutus lifts the sunglasses from his face, perches them on his head, spreads his arms out in front of him and exclaims _"Welcome to Berkeley!"_ Then he adds solemnly,_ "So I guess this is good-bye, for now at least." _

Josh feels an adrenalin rush through him and he is both exhilarated and weary. _"Oh yea, about Truckee--" _he says as he scans the view in front of him, he still is unsure about that proposition, and a little scared of how Brutus might take rejection. _"You--you've given up any idea of killing me right?"_

Brutus chuckles and shakes his head like it is the craziness thing he's ever heard. He puts his big paw of a hand around the back of Josh's neck and runs a thumb over his Adam's apple. _"If I wanted to kill you, you'd be dead by now kid."_ His thumb lingers over the hickey on Josh's neck. _"Stay safe, I'll find you later,"_ he mumbles before trapping him in a bear hug for so long Josh thinks he might have fallen a sleep on his shoulder. But he lets go, straightens his T-shirt over his belly and gets back into the old truck.

Josh watches the truck fart away, and for a moment he thinks it happened too quick, that he has been left alone too suddenly without care. He turns and walks toward the campus but stops when he hears the sound of the emphysematic truck make a turn and drive pass him. Brutus leans out the window and shouts his name. Without skipping a beat a warm smile crosses his face and he waves good bye.

OK, so this is what it means to be grown up. The next hour he makes a few appointments with student advisers to see what his options are. He looks up cheap lodgings on the library Internet. He does a little campus sightseeing. All the while he runs his hands along wooden staircases, and marble walls, trying to feel something, anything that would bring him closer to his mother, dead for so many years. He tries to visualize her his age and wandering these same paths, but he can not reconcile the old pictures of the tall, obdurate, interesting co-ed with the blue-eyed, serious woman who held his hand as they crossed the street, who sat reading cross-legged while he chased pigeons and tried to do magic tricks on them. He remembers her soon to be stilled pale hands holding his cheeks. _"You mean world to me!" _she'd say. Each and every gold star, every scrap of art and A+ test he brought to her, she would move her hands over them like they were precious objects. And when she looked up from them and at him afterward he could see she was exultant. These memories bloom in his mind like exotic flowers, bright and opulent. He has never made anyone else so happy.

It is his mother who he wants to speak most truly about the new person he is becoming, as if the years between her death and now were nothing other than an extended vacation. She was so smart. So tough. His mother had all the self-confidence and strength in character that he and his dad lack. Lost without her his dad stayed stuck in his well of grief after her death, and was no help to Josh. Perhaps Josh looked too much like his mother, and it was the terrible reminder of his loss that made him push his son away and into camps whenever he was on school breaks, away from the person he needed comfort from the most. Instead, food became Josh's comfort and he ate and ate and ate until his dad found a great new home for them. He can't say he was immediately in love with his new brother then, but he was so grateful for him that it dwarfed everything else in his life.

Like his mother Drake was person of infinite natural confidence so it was easy for Josh to become completely enamored with him. Drake is still so incredibly handsome, so secure in his position amongst the elite of the elite of gorgeous people that you can almost hear the clatter of jaws dropping to the floor when he walks into a room. And everyone who sees him for that moment falls a little in love with him and each stretch like flowers in a bush just wanting for him to choose them. All he had to do was reach out and pluck whomever he desired. The next day he could pluck even more, so easily and never-ending, leaving a trail of petals at his feet.

What an utter fool Josh had been, a complete and utter _fool_. He never had a chance with Drake. There is no use in longing for a brightness that would never be his, this is perfectly clear. In his mind he knows this and accepts it, but his heart still lags behind. He would do better to forget him. Like his mother, he exists only in memory, beautiful and unattainable.

A cool marine wind blows through the trees. The last of the little purple flowers from a blossoming tree fall on the bench and walk in front of it. Josh stands and watches the flowers and a squirrel move along the path. The sun is tilting across his shoulders, his shadow on the ground before him is long and lanky. Students on their bicycles click by in the rapid approaching dusk. He is so tired that bright little sparks of light swim in the peripheries of his vision. He throws pieces of his leftover pizza to the brave fat squirrel playing at his feet. Tiny dark hands inspect the food before it is dropped back uneaten onto the sidewalk. The squirrel scolds him before disappearing back up into the foliage. And with that last little rejection Josh feels that the world he inhabits somehow turned out dead wrong, flawed in unexpected ways, and the world knows it too. Even the squirrels know it. No family. No mother. He is lost in a place with no home to go home to.

His phone rings and for a second he hopes it is Drake. He sees it is a new number and he knows it is Brutus instead.


	14. The Sighting

And finally, after hours of smelling cow feed, or cow shit, or maybe it is just the methane gas coming from the cows being sliced, diced and pureed into ground meat, I leave the stink of Hwy 5 and enter the Altamont Pass. Here the land divides irregularly into hills and valleys dotted with thousands of windmills. I feel like I've entered a twilight zone--in front of a gorgeous tangerine sunset are miles and miles of over-sized fans swinging their arms to their own beat like dancers standing in place. If Josh were here he'd be all giddy and make me stop to take a picture. He always saw beauty in things I would ignore otherwise.

Traffic is solid, every so often a car might budge forward a few inches, so it is nighttime when I get to Berkeley. Although Josh phone is off and I bet he is already asleep somewhere, I head straight to the campus's center plaza just to have a look. The area is wreathed in a thin fog from an ocean I can't see. A moist breeze curls and wraps the fog around the street lamps. I sit at the edge of a water fountain so lazily splashing. I look down at my map and read _Sproul Plaza_. I should have known he would come to this campus. He is here somewhere looking for a ghost, I know it. And my heart swells in anticipation of what lies ahead.

By now he has probably figured out this place isn't his mom. I remember seeing Josh's mother alive only once, I think we were in the fifth grade and she came to pick him up early. I barely knew Josh or cared of his existence but we all remember his mom. She stood tall, thin and poised, somehow stiller and more regal that ordinary women, like a true matriarch. And she was absolutely beautiful. Josh has not inherited his mother's unspoken authority, but in appearance he has grown to wear his mother like a signature. Mother and son share the same soft features, those handsome smooth planes and straight lines. I wonder what Walter feels when he looks at Josh now.

I get up, quietly fold the cellphone and drop it in my pocket and head downtown to find a nice hotel for us. I find a fancy downtown hotel with a crowded bar at street level. I ask for a Heineken but the bartender hands me a soft drink instead. Eating some "baked not fried" french fries and sipping my drink I stare people around me, all of them versions of people I already know. There is a Eric/Craig-like couple next to me, some too-smart/too-skinny Mindy-types to my left, far too many slacker Trevor lookalikes, and a blur of all the girls I've dated. Not one person who is like Josh, no one in the world is like him. I go to my room, pop a few of the painkillers the docs gave me, and pull the disinfected sheets over me. When I shut my eyes, I squeeze them tight and I try to dream of Josh and warmth, Josh and the sweet floral smell coming through his skin. I want to dream of comfortable and wonderful Josh, and his soft mouth.

\--

The next morning I shower, put on a clean shirt and a pair of jeans without a blood stain, and walk out with cellphone in hand into the sidewalk. I send several pigeons wheeling, the flutter of their wings sounding like the clapping hands of an audience. Then, for the rest of the morning, our boy sends me on a wild goose chase. First he could be within any 5 buildings on campus, later in any fifteen stores that show up around his GPS location. The whole morning becomes a blur of coffee shops serving mocha, frappucinos, Vietnamese noodle shops with whirring ventilation and so many people. So many people! There are young and homeless, old and homeless, rich co-eds, hip students, and men in all fashions of turbans or baseball hats or skateboard wear, the women in everything from sleek saris or leather and studs, jeans or tight, tight vinyl. Not one of them Josh.

Around lunchtime I stop and regroup, who knows Josh better than I do? I close the phone and look at the options in front of me. Not the tattoo parlor. Not the copy shop. There are a few dingy looking restaurants, books and clothes stores, two jewelry stands where sales are taking place out in the street and a cafe with bright blue and white stripped awnings and plastic chairs and mismatched tables. Josh would either be in the used bookshop or maybe eating lunch. My stomach makes the decision for me and a slip into a restaurant. My waitress is nose ringed with a dark knitted cap and has tattoos running up her arms, a long necklace of keys hang of her neck. She can't be more than 20 years old. I look down at the menu as she asking me something but a cappuchino machine drowns her voice out. I have to look up at her and the window behind her. That is when I see him.

There he is, Josh, walking out of a used bookstore across the street from where I sit. He walks to the curb to wait for a light and squints up at the hazy, afternoon sun. I swallow my breath and stare at him, transfixed. My mouth goes dry. The voices of the waitress, other diners and clinking of their dinnerware grow faint while my breathing and heartbeat grow louder in my ears as if I were suddenly listening to them under water. The sight of him pulls at me like an instinct.

He is wearing a checkered flannel shirt I don't recognize but is better suited for this weather, the sleeves are rolled up to the forearms revealing thinner sharp-boned wrists. His usual jerky moments are slow and easy. I can tell he is tired, like he just walked the whole 600 miles to this point. Someone who didn't know him well might well have supposed he is just being cool teenager leaning himself against a lamppost. But Josh isn't cool, and even less so when he is trying to be--he is using the post to hold himself up. When the light changes he has to push himself off to get himself to walk across the street. He crosses the corner and for a moment is only two yards away from me as he passes the restaurant, we are only separated by a tall pane of glass.

He doesn't see me, but we are so close I can see his jaw bristling with a few days' worth of beard stopping at his smooth neckline visible from the button open at his collar. His hair, which he had lately been so careful to keep ordered and straighter, has turned back into scattered dark curls around his head. What concerns me is how the shadows around his eyes accentuate how his peculiarly clear eyes have gone blank, like shallow tins of water. He looks utterly and painfully exhausted yet at the same time freakishly lovely, just so beautiful.

What I am feeling is something I cannot put into words. I am happy, overwhelmed, numbed and relieved. The chaos in the air and in my heart align themselves; the innate pain and heartache surrounding everything seems, suddenly, less. I have to really hold myself back from giggling stupidly or jumping up and down on my seat like a little kid. I found him!


	15. The Talk

I skip out on my meal and follow close behind him, so close I can almost reach out and touch him, but I don't, not yet. I follow very slowly because he is walking slowly. I watch him nod at two young hobos in plaid jackets and they exchange pleasant sounding words I can not hear. When I pass the hobos I see they have a sign that says "Keep your coins, we want _you_ to change".

We also pass a couple of preteens in soccer uniforms, a policeman on a bicycle, an old man walking his dog, a young Asian girl in jogging shorts. The soles of my boots grit against the sidewalk in a purposeful rhythm behind him, adding to a new tune in my head. Then he turns into a building so sharply I almost miss him. I shadow him up the stairs inside building that has no neon sign, no large signboard and that doesn't look particularly old, but looks run-down. Most likely it looked old when it was built. I keep expecting Josh to sense me behind him and turn around, but he is lost in his own thoughts as he jiggles a key in a stubborn door. Then after two or three shoulder heaves, he gets the door open, their hinges creaking in protest.

_"Josh,"_ I finally say, quietly.

He spins around, his round eyes widen, his lips part. He looks at me with a confused expression, as if he is trying to make out something in front of direct sunlight. He blinks, and I give him a tight, little nonchalant smile that makes him squint and blink at me again like a man coming out of a dark theater. He glances up at my hurt forehead before he re-meets my eyes. What has happened to his eyes? The familiar has turned strange, there is no trace of affection in them. Any glimmer of love I had held in them in the darkness in our room seem to be gone in Berkeley. There's silence, breathing, and distantly, the sound of traffic.

I clear my throat. _"You owe me a conversation."_

I wait, but Josh gives me no immediate response and again I feel something like panic coming over me. What is going through his mind? I watch how he sucks in his lips and bites down out of frustration, and when he releases them they are a natural shade of crimson like no lipstick I've ever seen. I have to turn my face and look away, it is the little things that squeeze my heart.

_"Fair enough,"_ he finally says. I barely recognize his voice, it sounds like Josh but with a forced, neutral tone usually adopted by some corporate cat for business use. He turns sideways in the doorway, allowing me to pass.

I walk into the little room. There is bed, and a desk with a book of some kind and a newspaper with yesterday's date on it. Josh walks to the far end--the farthest point from me and does not look at me. We drop our backpacks at the same time. I think that at least we are here alone and with no outside distractions in this foreign little room. At least now we can enter into a second phase of this thing.

_"You just left. Just _left_. So I know you must be pretty mad at me for what I said, or didn't say, but--"_

He finally looks towards me and his face, usually so open and cheerful, sets. We are like Civil War soldiers facing each other across trenches, brothers but in different armies. He holds up a hand and says _"Stop."_

_"I'm not mad at you all," _he says_. "You were absolutely right, and I'm fine with it."_ Josh is using that same cool voice with gaze that holds no hint of any emotion._ "So just turn around and go home. Tell mom and dad I'm doing great and I'll call them later when I'm settled. You can go home. Now."  
_

Oh man, he might as well been looking at the wall behind me for all that I see in his expression. He has somehow shut out any love or friendship, and I feel a physical pain as though a part of myself has been severed with it. Yet I never once take my eyes off his because I need him to hear every word I will say and I need him to believe me.

_"No. I'm _not_ leaving. Because you are acting totally _insane_. How could you? How could leave and not talk to me?"_ I take two steps towards him arms wide and palms face up questioning him. _"How could you make mom, Walter and me crazy with worry?"_

He examines the nails of his right hand as if considering a good answer, when he finally does speak, I think his sight line is on a crack in the wall past me. _"I'm sorry. I should have called, but I'm fine. I'm sorry you came out all this way for nothing."_

_"No, I'm sorry,"_ I say the words that are inadequate to carry the weight of all the mess I caused, but I say them anyway. _"And I came all this way to get you. To take you back home so we can be together. I have a plan, just listen ..."_ But Josh is shaking his head 'no' and I suddenly become aware of a tremor in my leg._ "Wait, wait, Josh, just listen to me."_

_"I can't go back. Just trust that first instinct you had about us and go home. It's OK, really--I'm perfectly fine."_ He is still looking at that damn crack in the wall.

_  
"No! No. I didn't have an instinct against us, I just needed time not to be scared of this big _thing_ between us. And you know what? I wasn't scared of the _thing_, just scared of how you might leave me when you find someone smarter and nicer in college because everyone is starting to notice and want you now. I was scared of us not working and it killing me if you left me. I was scared of for once in my life being the one that got hurt really really badly because I really really wanted this."_ I didn't even realize this was the fear that stopped me then until I say it, but it is true. That was it. So far in my life I've been free of anything genuinely tragic, so I figure am due for a big one--losing Josh. _"But you know what? We've already been in this thing way before Saturday night, way before and you know it. We have belonged to each other for a long long time already. I love you, you love me and that is just how it is going to be fears and all."_

_  
He looks at me like I'd just sprouted tentacles. Actually he does open and close his mouth in a silent movie version of "What"? Then goes very still._

_  
"So come back with me and when you decide where you want to go for college we can go there together,"_ I continue._ "I can write music anywhere, and the Spin City accountant said I need a little tax shelter so maybe I can buy a small place where we can live -- save you money on expenses so you can choose a college you want to go to and not just one you can afford."_

Josh gives a soft, contrary little sigh and lowers himself into the chair next to the desk. I watch a thought travel across his face, creating a shadow between his eyebrows. When he finally responds it comes calm and considered, the side of him I suspect to emerge more and more and the years ahead.

_"I don't mean to imply you are being insincere, but you know how many times I've heard you declare love for someone? You just miss our being brothers, that's all. I'm sorry I can't go back to that. But if you go home now you'll see, you'll be happy you didn't pursue this."  
_

_"God dammit, will you quit telling me to go home!"_ I could hear the anger entering my voice. _"And this is different, different in a million ways!"_ Yet given the hours I have thought of him, given the hours in the car and even in my bed, you would think I could cook up the right words to change his mind. The love I feel is so huge I have no way to describe it.

_"This isn't you. You are the 'Drake and a different girl every week', I am not going to change that. And your career? Your contract holders are business men that signed that kind of Drake--not gay Drake, not one-man Drake. They know your fan base is made up of girls. And on top of all that I couldn't bare to make you the object of the derision and ridicule for living a gay life."_

_"Don't you love me anymore? Did I ruin that?"_ I ask angrily. Part of me wants to wrestle him to the floor, and twist his arm behind his back until he calls UNCLE and believes me.

_"I love you enough to let you be who you really are,"_ he says with a lack of concern that is too affected and a tone too false, like his is being overly careful not to let his voice carry even the tiniest speck of tenderness. Josh could surprise you. He'd do anything I told him to do in his dogged, earnest and devoted way then suddenly display a deep and rock-hard rebel stubbornness. So I change tactics.

_"Josh,"_ I say in a patient cajoling way moving towards the table. _"Half my fan base would be turned on by the thought of us and the other half will think they are one that could change me. Besides, it is about the music that makes my career, not what I do with you, though you've always inspired it."_

_  
He drops his eyes a moment, then they come back to me. We stare at each other but the moment doesn't hold and he turns away, I am not going to be permitted that kind of easy resolution._

_"And the girls. I looked constantly for years for one to please me more than a week -- I just don't think I have it in me to love a woman, not in the way I love you."_ I hear the softening of my tone, the artful lowering of volume. _"I wouldn't drive six blocks, much less six hundred miles for a girl. And look, I got you something this morning."_ I turn and reach in my backpack. _"Here, they were selling this handmade soap on Telegraph Avenue. The lady says lavender has all these great healing properties."_

_  
Oh the boy loves his soap. At first he looks at the wrapped gift I placed on the table like it might be an exploding trick. But then he carefully picks it up and lifts it to his nose. He breathes in deeply. I watch his long fingers unwrap the soap as a faint scent of lavender rises like a new softening presence entering the room. I think "those fingers, those hands, made me come" and a shiver of lust runs through me._

_  
"And ridicule for a gay life? Can't be too bad. Craig and Eric seem pretty happy."_

Josh's head cocks slightly to one side as to better catch my words._ "Craig and Eric-- a gay couple?"_

_"What? You didn't know? What did you think when you saw them hold hands all the time?"_

_"I just thought--I thought they were really really good friends."_

_"Oh Josh, and you are the smart one?"_ I sigh, shaking my head in disbelief and pinching the bridge of my nose with my index finger and thumb. _"How did you make it all the way here without being beaten up and robbed?"_

He points to my forehead. _"I obviously did better than you!"_

There is something about the turn of this conversation that makes it all feel almost normal again. I reach out and touch his arm without a thought, like I've done thousands of times. He flinches suddenly and pushes back his chair with embarrassment that he tries to cover up by reaching for his backpack to put the soap in it. He starts to say something but his cellphone interrupts the moment. It isn't a ring I recognize, Josh has a different ring tone for everyone he knows, which is everyone that I know. _"Yea?"_ He answers with a familiarity that bothers me. In the midst of my mounting joy, insecurity comes back. _"Yes, I think I'm pretty much decided."_ Pause. _"OK tomorrow, I'll wait for your call."_ Pause. _"No, I'm fine--yes, OK bye."_

_"Who was that?"_

He won't meet my eyes or rather his eyes make a nervous pass across my face and then turn down. _"Just an old trucker I met a few days ago. He developed a sort of fatherly interest."_ He says it lightly, but I think I detect a faint undercurrent of worry in his voice.

I reach across the table and snatch the phone from his hand so quickly he doesn't have time to react and stop me. I see the unfamiliar 530 area code numbers lining up one after the other on the screen. _"Any old man that calls an eighteen year old this many times is a pervert not a father figure."_ I block the number and fling the phone back at him. He catches it clumsily. _"Now where were we?"_

"_You were about to leave, go home. You've missed too much school already. I have enough credits to graduate, you don't."_

_"Oh, yea. You do realize that you're not going to get me to leave?"_

_"I hoped you'd be discouraged by my complete indifference."_

_"We are going back together or staying here together. I'm fine either way."_

_"Can't you see that things have changed too much?"_

_"We're still us, that hasn't changed. Me and you, that is how it is always going to be _forever_."_

_"We're not still us." _He argues. _"We're all broken to pieces."_ There is a catch in his voice. The surface holds steady, but I can feel the crumbling inside him, along with the currents of hope and longing that flow between us.

Silence steals into the room. It is a silence strong enough to make your heart hurt. I watch him being so strong and still so vulnerable at the same time. I watch his shoulders straighten and fall with each breath. I look at those saddened and fatalistic eyes, that lovable face, his air of quiet dignity and vanished joy. And I do not know whether to choke with rage or with tears. I do not enjoy the frustration. In my mind I am running a finger down his chest and stomach. Every cell of mine aching for a languid touch, he must feel it too. I reach across and run my thumb along his jaw, there is something tremendously real about the way it feels like life itself. It is bristly and soft yet still so far away. _"I know how to mend the pieces."_ I tell him softly.

His nose and cheeks and chin grow pink, I see his chin crinkle a little and his lower lip tremble. He backs up, _"N-no, w-wait."_ His voice is suddenly, startlingly quavery.

_"I'm tired of waiting."_


	16. For Love

Drake's touch is so gentle that it isn't really the touch of fingers on his skin, it is the brush of his fingertips on the fine hairs attached to his jaw, a whisper of movement. Josh feels his face contort, the muscles twitching without his permission. _"N-no, w-wait."_ His cheeks feel hot, and he realizes he is blushing so he turns his face.

_ "I'm tired of waiting."_

Josh has to blink hard, a crying jab threatens and he is determined not to falter. He backs further until he hits the wall, his body rigid, hands balling into fists.

_  
"Don't you remember our night together?"_ Drake asks with a voice falling down in volume until it is a purr._ "You weren't that drunk."_

Josh is shaking his head but of course he remembers, and having it brought up again makes that night become a vivid daydream in his mind. He looks at the wall, its white smoothness unbroken by pictures, and tries to block the memory but cannot.

Drake steps into his space. _"Josh, we were very good. It's not always that good between people."_ The softness of his voice cuts through him. His tone is gentle, but firm, like the voice of someone that knows exactly what he wants and it makes Josh's knees tremble. He tries, he tries to get his legs and arms to work and heave Drake away but he has become paralyzed.

And although he is breathing as if he just sprinted around the block, Josh can't move a muscle when Drake runs a thumb across his lower lip, and nothing when Drake pushes that thumb into his mouth and forces his gaze from the wall and into his eyes. In them Josh's sees a melange of brown colors bursting, swirling, undulating, and a solid black core holding steady and fierce at him. He does nothing when Drake unbuttons his shirt and runs that wet thumb down solid ribs and stomach, which contract beneath his touch. His exposed skin feels hot and burning, as if he suddenly has a fever. He shudders as hands come up around his hair pulling his head down. Drake kisses his old mark on his bare neck, then his chin, and then finally, passionately, his mouth. Drake's mouth is warm and sweet and lingering, his tongue sliding between his lips pushing his own mouth open. Josh hears his throat release a involuntary moan. He does nothing but allow himself to be taken.

Suddenly he is falling on the bed, back on his elbows with his shirt falling open around him, knees bent over the edge. For a moment he thinks he's been discarded. Panic seizes his heart and he fully expects to hear _"Ew, never mind."_ But he sees Drake standing between his legs fighting off his shirt, the seams ripping when he pulls it roughly over his head. When Drake lowers himself above him Josh stops thinking of things like sin, heartbreak, business consequences. He can only think of Drake and himself. He reaches out and grabs Drake's belt buckle and pulls the leather from it. When he releases the catch and unzips the jeans Drake lets out a long shuddered sigh. His arms wrap around Josh and his mouth comes down hard on his. Josh enfolds him willingly, following the path of his desire.

Hands, tongues, bared flesh, pushing down pants. They say nothing, there are no words for what was going on between them. Together they climb, crawl, ascend to dizzying heights where there is hardly air to breathe. They have to gasp. It is as if everything had been ordained by fate, as if it were the most natural thing in the world this miraculous overlap of opposites.

The world begins to explode in a shimmer of sparks and Josh feels the tears begin to burn behind his eyes. The first drops fall threaten to burst the floodgates._ "No." _he moans as he presses the heels of his hands into his eyes until he sees fractals of light swirling like paisleys. He needs to stop the tears from coming. As the boulder that was holding down his emotions disappears, grief begins to uncurl inside him, like a moving, potent snake of sorrow. He starts to cry, brokenly, and attempts to get up and move away from Drake, until he feels hands on his forearms pulling his palms from his face, and arms enclosing him, pinning him to the bed. Drake envelops him as if he were a little child, and their warm, damp bodies slip back together.

He finds himself convulsed with weeping after the orgasm, weeping into Drake's shoulder so much it seems like he is retching. He cries because he was a coward, Drake had hurt him so profoundly that he ran away from everything he loves. He cries for Brutus, his terrible life and his slim hope for redemption, and for being unable to be for him whatever it was that he had wanted from Josh--to be his son, his friend, or maybe even his lover. He cries because he misses his mother and the woman she was before she got sick and turned into some stranger--something monstrous that just pretended to be his beautiful mother. His longstanding guilt of being scared and avoiding her during her last days flows out in sobs. Most of all he misses her kind voice:_"Goodnight room, goodnight moon, goodnight cow jumping over the moon".  
_

But he cries most of all for Drake. Experiencing him again, the feeling and sound of him, brings along the familiar sensation of the love he feels for him, a sensation so intense he is not sure he can let go of it again. He wants to whisper in Drake's ear that he knows a place to hide where no one will ever find him and he wants Drake to promise that he'll follow. But he can't, he can't.

Drake holds Josh tightly until all the horrible feelings flush out of him. Soon the only sounds he can make out are his own asthmatic gasps and Drake's thumping heart against his own heartbeat, as if one were dependent upon the other to keep beating. Josh tries to stay awake, but sleep is tugging, tugging.

\--

Josh wakes up in the darkness of night. Drake is at his side now, breathing lightly with his cheek resting on Josh's shoulder; he can feel the rise and fall of each of inhale and exhale. Josh tries to stay as still as possible, trying not to disturb him, trying very hard to keep him close just for a few more minutes before he has to get up.

He can't help but think he is living someone else's life. Someone handsomer, or beautiful, should be lying here with Drake, not him. He starts picturing all the women that Drake will date, always perfect and always breathtakingly lovely. Maybe his dates would include men now, all taller and cooler than him, thin-waisted in Armani jackets over white silk shirts. He pulls his deadened arm out from under Drake carefully, and Drake mumbles something and draws up into a ball.

He gets up and watches Drake sleep. He looks as perfectly gorgeous as only Drake can. It is like he has tiny invisible angels arranging his hair so that his fingers would always itch to run through it, and tugging his shirt to reveal just the right amount of freckles that dot his skin--his wrists, the back of his hands, and his nose, chin and cheeks. Those angels made you want to connect all the dots. Josh reaches down and with his index finger traces a little heart out of freckles on Drake's forearm.

Josh convinces himself he is right to leave him again. Would Drake think he was cowardly or thoughtful? Doesn't matter. All he hopes for is that Drake realizes he did it out of love.


	17. Fin

Some kind of internal warning wakes me abruptly up from my deep sleep. I grope one arm around in the bed for Josh. Where'd he go? I sit up and wrap the blanket around my shoulders. The smell of lavender eddies from the bathroom, but I can see from where I sit that he isn't in the shower. I get up and walk across the small room; his cellphone and an old Polaroid picture of his parents are left on the table, nothing else of his remains. I feel a tremor in my chest like a tiny earthquake ripping through my heart. Oh no.

I run. I run out of the room, along the hallway and all those closed doors, passing an odd woman who steps aside, shocked. I run down the empty staircase, my footsteps echoing in the empty well. I tear open the exit door and stumble a little on the blanket as I run along the sidewalk in a random direction. It is very early, some stars are still in the sky. A faint morning light is thin, cold and chilly against my skin. The street is empty and lonely with the people all gone, with the only the reminders of them - crumpled fliers, gum wrappers, lying in the gutters.

I stop running when I see the only two figures on the block. One is Josh bent over talking to a hobo. His hair is still wet from the shower, a tumult of dark curls, and his backpack is draped across one shoulder. I stop and stand there without understanding. My face I know is showing my perplexity, with my eyes fixing themselves beseechingly on him, as if praying to him to make it untrue: he didn't do this, he isn't leaving.

He turns and sees me, then straightens. The hazy morning light makes his great eyes, with their elaborate lashes, appear sea-blue green. His gaze moves over me, eyes to shoulders to legs. I must look insane--barefoot and wrapped loosely in a blanket; I can't even remember if I put back on my boxers last night. For a moment his expression is the one you see on people when they can't find the words they need. The hobo starts laughing, an odd cackling kind of laugh, then Josh finally just smiles at me, a bright irresistible smile. _"I found an open bakery,"_ he says holding up a brown paper bag in one hand. _"I got cinnamon rolls for our breakfast."_

To my horror, my face crumples. Tears, hot and unstoppable, begin to drip quickly down my cheeks. I watch his lovely face grow paler with the fright of my grief. I don't think he's ever seen my cry so openly before. _"I thought--"_ I sob. _"I thought you left again."_

In five long strides he is in front of me and I set my damp face on his shoulder and continue to cry. He wraps his arms around me, pulling the blanket tighter. _"I tried to,"_ he admits. _"I went two blocks and saw the bakery and I couldn't go any farther. All I could think of is how much you'd really really like those cinnamon rolls."_

I peer out from over his shoulder. Behind him the sky is suddenly sad and beautiful, freshly stained pink where the sun now just barely peeks out and burns away the grey. _"Why?"_ I squeak. I want to shake him. I want to punch him in the mouth for scaring me.

He pulls away a little and runs a hand over my cheeks to wipe the courses of tears away. He takes a deep breath._ "I'm sorry, so sorry --there are, well, there are a lot of things I need to work on."_ I can sense the change in him, as if he received an electric shock or possibly a revelation, a vision of possibilities he hadn't dared to dream of. We look at each other and our gazes move over each other's features. I close my eyes a while, trying to recover from the lows and high of the past few minutes. When I reopen them he is still watching me.

_"And I was scared you'll hate me one day,"_ he adds.

I pull him back and hug him. His hair still smells like shampoo and I breathe in the scent. _"Never. I could never hate you."_

_"I hope so."_ He sighs deeply and I can feel his body shudder. _"Do you really think this is going to work?"_

_"Yes,"_ I say looking back at the hobo Josh had been talking to. The ragged man is smiling and fist pumping his approval and suddenly I think Berkeley is an OK place. We would fit in here. _"And there is one thing I can definitely guarantee."_

_"What's that?"_

_"We'll never, ever, be boring."_

He laughs. Laughs! And I realize I hadn't heard him laugh in so long. I had always loved that sound, warm and contagious, very sexy in a silly sort of way. And now I'm laughing too. I go from crying to laughing like a madman. I'm laughing at how the strange pairing of an odd couple blossomed into this. I laugh because I know we are meant for each other as strange as that concept will be for everyone else.

He reaches down and kisses me and I hear a song begin to rise up in my heart, something joyful and happy. It composes in my mind from the thoughts of his beautiful body and warm mouth next to mine again. It is a tune made up for all the crumpled sheets, kisses and caresses, and sensual nights ahead of us. It is a bright melody of a life that will be so wonderful. So irresistible. So awesome.

THE END


End file.
